In 1959, when I was 10 years old, I was fascinated by the new occupants of a big redbrick colonial house around the corner from my family’s quirky custom split-level. Word had spread quickly throughout Highland Park, our suburb on the North Shore of Chicago, that the new occupants were former Chicago Bears quarterback Sid Luckman and his family.
This was of particular interest to me, since I had recently become a rabid Chicago Bears fan. An embarrassing amount of my mental and emotional life was consumed by the team and its fortunes. My most noticeable talent in those days was my drawing ability, and my school notebooks were filled with pictures of football players and the hash-marked turf at Wrigley Field, where the Bears played their home games until 1971. On autumn Sunday mornings, while I fidgeted in confirmation class at Congregation Solel—our activist Reform rabbi had temporarily stopped believing in the bar mitzvah—I emerged from my football reveries only long enough to write an occasional essay about the nonexistence of God. Judaism was my faith, but the Chicago Bears were my religion.
And Sid Luckman was professional football’s Moses, having led the Bears, the first modern pro football dynasty, to the promised land. Although I was too young to have seen Luckman play, his legendary status was reinforced every time I heard fans of my father’s generation exclaim—usually when one of Luckman’s lesser successors overthrew an open receiver—“Where’s Sid Luckman when we need him?” The great quarterback presided over my obsession with the Bears, even though I was too young to appreciate, or even know about, his specific deeds. Only later would I learn that he had once led the most feared team in the National Football League—the “Monsters of the Midway”—to five national championship appearances and four titles in seven years during the 1940s; that in his first year as starting quarterback, the Bears had manhandled the Washington Redskins 73–0, still and probably forever the most lopsided victory in NFL history; that Sid Luckman was the first man to throw seven touchdown passes in a game and the first to throw for more than 400 yards; and that he held the record for the highest percentage of passes in a single season that went for touchdowns. Despite the rapid evolution of the passing game, most of Luckman’s several team records wouldn’t be broken for 65 years.
More important, however, was this: the intricate T-formation offense he spearheaded had ushered in the modern era of pro football, elevating a sport that had been the grimy sideshow to the more popular rah-rah college game. This historical achievement was memorialized in the Bears’ fight song, “Bear Down, Chicago Bears”: “We’ll never forget the way you thrilled the nation / With your T formation.” If the song was catchier than most, that was because it was written by the man who had already penned “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” and “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” for Disney’s movie Cinderella.
I knew the words by heart because I was lucky enough to go to several Chicago Bears games in the late 1950s and 1960s, when the song was blared scratchily over the loudspeaker. Of all the memorable experiences of my childhood, nothing captured my imagination quite like Bears games at Wrigley Field. In those media-deprived days, before home games were even televised, attending a Bears game was a rare glimpse of a special kingdom full of pageantry and armed battle. As my father and I walked up North Sheffield Avenue, the air crackled with the pregame chatter of Jack Brickhouse and his sidekick, newspaper columnist/color man Irv Kupcinet, pouring out of hundreds of Sony transistor radios—a new phenomenon. And now we were through the clicking turnstiles and mounting Wrigley’s ramps until the scene was revealed in all its glory: the brilliant green turf; the meticulously limed lines; the fans in their seats already unscrewing their thermoses of coffee and nipping from their flasks to stay warm; the ivy on Wrigley’s outfield walls turning brown, yellow, and orange, or gone altogether, leaving a spindly network of vines stuck to the brick. Most exciting of all were the Bears players themselves, warming up, military in their navy-blue jerseys and helmets and immaculate white pants; immense in their shoulder pads; practicing passes, pinwheeling placekicks, and high revolving punts; running phantom plays under the cold sun. And everything was in saturated color, not the faded hues of our first Zenith color television.
* * *
I knew Luckman only from a few photos—old publicity shots in which he was poised to pass, right arm cocked while the left pointed downfield to an imaginary receiver, or of his big, square handsome head stuffed into a flimsy leather football helmet. In the town that Carl Sandburg had labeled “City of the Big Shoulders,” no shoulder was bigger or more revered than Sid Luckman’s right one.
That Luckman now lived a mere 100 yards from my house—and across the street from where I was developing into a sticky-fingered receiver in neighborhood touch football games—didn’t quite make sense to me. Powerful figures lived in our midst, but they were doctors, lawyers, and small titans of business whose achievements were obscure and uninteresting to a 10-year-old boy. Sid Luckman, however, was part of history—a treasured relic of an era before face masks, before the integration of American sports, before television came along to broadcast pro football’s appeal. And that name! Was there a better one in all of sports, joining two of the most vital elements of athletic success at mid-century, luck and manliness? It was so perfect that he hadn’t needed a nickname, unlike other early pillars of Bears history such as Harold “Red” Grange, aka the Galloping Ghost; Bronislau “Bronko” Nagurski; or George “One-Play” McAfee—or future pillars like “the Kansas Comet,” Gale Sayers.
Like boxer Barney Ross and baseball greats Hyman “Hank” Greenberg before him and Sandy Koufax after, Sid Luckman symbolized the strength, endurance, and greatness of the Jewish people.The only aspect of Luckman’s arrival in my neighborhood that made any sense to me was that he was Jewish. Highland Park was a lush, lakeside, liberal suburb that had opened its doors to Jews years before, while neighboring towns like Kenilworth and Lake Forest discouraged upwardly mobile refugees from the crowded Jewish ghettos of Chicago. Even so, I was too young to fully appreciate the irony and pathos embodied by a Jewish quarterback who had led the meanest team in professional football during the very years the Nazis were murdering two-thirds of the Jews in Europe. Like boxer Barney Ross and baseball greats Hyman “Hank” Greenberg before him and Sandy Koufax after, Sid Luckman symbolized the strength, endurance, and greatness of the Jewish people.
I was even too young to have heard him give a talk to the Highland Park High School student body. In any other profession, Luckman would have been hitting his stride, but by 1959 he had been retired from football a decade already, done with playing at 33, his best years behind him a few years before that. He was still young and looked like a movie star, perhaps like Gregory Peck, born the same year, 1916. If the students expected to hear about some of Luckman’s triumphs, they were disappointed. Decades later, my older brother told me that Luckman had regaled the teenagers with the story of his first NFL game at quarterback, in 1939, during which he said he had done almost nothing right. All kids like a story about the fallibility of adults, especially one who rose to the very top of his profession.
More than half a century later, my interest in Sid Luckman was reignited by the discovery that I could watch him in action during the 1940s on YouTube and see at last what everyone had been talking about when I was child. I was seized with the desire to know more about this figure who had remained just beyond my reach for so long.
And not only beyond my reach. For some reason, Sid Luckman had never been the subject of the documentary or biography he deserved. Where was his valedictory autobiography? More than most famous athletes, he had revolutionized the game he played, pioneered the modern role of quarterback, and set several enduring records. There have been countless refinements since the 1940s, and better athletes, but Luckman was the prototype of the modern quarterback. Yet he remained something of a marginal figure in the panorama of the 20th century’s greatest sports figures. Among that tiny subgroup of Jewish hall-of-fame athletes, Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, the NBA’s Dolph Schayes, and swimmer Mark Spitz have been treated to biographies, even award-winning documentaries—but not Sid Luckman.
The reason, it turned out, was buried deep in the Internet, in an item that was simply too unbelievable to be true. It seemed impossible that virtually no one knew of it, that there was ever a time when something that had once been so public could have remained so unknown. What I stumbled on was a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions that had been remembered by almost nobody.
* * *
Had it not been for a chance conversation in a suburban Washington, DC, coffee shop shortly after Sid Luckman’s death, in 1998, at the age of 81, the story might well have died with him.
A Washington, DC, sports columnist named Dan Daly, who was researching a book of anecdotes about the NFL’s early days, was sitting with one of his loyal readers, an old-timer who was a valuable source of information about professional football’s past. The conversation turned to Luckman’s recent death, and the old-timer clucked, “It’s an embarrassment what happened with his father.”
“What happened?” Daly asked.
“You know, he went to prison for murder.”
Daly was stunned that a story like that could be kept under wraps for so long. When he looked into it, he discovered that the murder wasn’t the half of it.
In 2012, Daly published a book called The National Forgotten League: Entertaining Stories and Observations from Pro Football’s First Fifty Years, in which he included several pages about Sid Luckman’s father among almost 400 pages of quirky facts and anecdotes. No one seemed to notice.
I traced Daly’s footsteps into newspaper archives and then drilled deeper, troubled at every turn. I finally picked up the phone and with some trepidation dialed the number of Sid Luckman’s only son, now a 75-year-old retired businessman. I introduced myself as a former Highland Park neighbor, and told Bob Luckman I wanted to write about his father, one of my childhood heroes. He was intrigued and immediately offered a few stories about the father he admired so much.
“Bob,” I eventually said, “can I ask you about your grandfather?”
After a brief pause, he said, “I’m surprised you know about him.”
“To tell you truth, I am too,” I said. “I found it on the Internet. What do you know about Meyer Luckman?”
The answer turned out to be, not much. Bob was almost 50 before he knew anything at all. When the rough spots between his father and him had long been sanded smooth, Bob had suggested to his father, then in his 70s, that he write an autobiography. There had once been an autobiography, Luckman at Quarterback—ghostwritten back in the 1940s—but it was long out of print, and so much had happened since then.
“I can’t, Bob,” his father said, explaining that there was something in the family past he didn’t want to come out, and if he wrote a book, someone was sure to bring it up.
Sid shared only the barest outline of the story, recounting that his father, the grandfather that Bob had been told had died young, had in fact been convicted—falsely, Sid claimed—of killing someone and had gone to prison. But Bob could tell by his father’s demeanor that it was probably not a good idea to press for more details.
“Something happened in a warehouse is all I know,” Bob said. “I don’t even think my sisters know.”
That Sid’s own children had been kept in the dark showed that the secret had grown an impenetrable shell.
“Bob,” I told him, “I’m in the awkward position of knowing a lot more about your grandfather than you do.” It was an invitation for him to ask me what I knew, but strangely, he didn’t say anything.
* * *
It became obvious as I continued my research that if I had any intention of writing about Sid Luckman, I would have to come clean with Bob. I could not separate Sid’s story from Meyer’s. A few weeks later, I made arrangements to fly to Chicago and meet Bob for breakfast at a Jewish deli in our hometown, Highland Park.
Bob is a large, robust presence, just under six feet tall like his father, with a Florida tan, light blue eyes, and a head of silvery hair. I begin by stressing my admiration for his father, lamenting that I never met him, and that I’ve been a hopeless Bears fan for most of my life. Bob responds with several stories about Sid, including an example of his legendary generosity. He mentions that his father’s nose was broken seven times, five in the pros. Given that he didn’t wear a face mask, I wonder why it wasn’t broken 700 times. I ask Bob about his own playing days—the football scholarship to Syracuse, the ankle injury, the failed comeback in his junior year there.
Once again, the specter of Meyer Luckman looms too large to be ignored. “You know that I can’t write about your dad without bringing in his childhood and the terrible stuff that happened.”
“With all the athletes and celebrities I know, I can’t believe no one ever mentioned my grandfather to me.”
“Your father made sure almost no one knew.”
“Look, I don’t care for myself, but Sid”—he referred to his father only as “Sid”—“never wanted it to come out.”
It occurred to me that this was the moment I had been dreading, running afoul not of Bob Luckman but of his father’s imposing ghost. I had given some thought about what to say.
“It was a very long time ago,” I told him. “It’s an important piece of history. Your father was an important part of history. And it’s already out there.” Anyone can pick up Daly’s book and run with the story.
“Well, I know there’s nothing I can do to stop you.”
“I think of it as maybe your father’s greatest victory,” I said, spinning it as best I could, “to overcome his family’s tragedy and become who he became.”
Did I believe that? Well, yes. It could never have been far from Sid Luckman’s mind for long, what his father had done, what Sid had left behind. Not being derailed by it, sticking to football, taking any job he could to afford college when the family finances collapsed, psychologically surmounting the shame—by comparison, memorizing the Bears’ playbook and suffering seven broken noses had to have been nothing.
I had the sudden urge to tell him more. It would serve no one to be cagey. “Do you know who the victim was?” I asked.
He shook his head.
When I told him, he took a moment, before saying, “I don’t like going against what I know Sid’s wishes would be. Some people came to me ten years ago to do a documentary on Sid, and I said no, because I knew he wouldn’t have wanted it to come out.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t go looking for it. And I need your help because I can’t tell the good parts of the story without you.”
In the parking lot, I gave Bob Luckman a DVD I had tracked down that contains rare film footage of his father playing for Columbia University—a token of my determination to do his father justice. The DVD includes two games from 1937 and 1938, played before Bob was born, when Sid was just a young man dealing with the reality of a father who was in prison for a crime that his grandson would soon enough know more about than he would like to.
As I drove off, I was torn between excitement about the project and anxiety about taking a good man’s secret into my own hands. Some secrets, once revealed, do real damage, but so do many unrevealed secrets, as I had learned writing a book about Holocaust survivors and their offspring. Unacknowledged trauma gets passed down in the genes, a poisonous and unavoidable heirloom.
We live in a world in which privacy has become almost obsolete, so it may be hard to imagine that the story of Meyer Luckman has been a secret for 80 years—especially since the secret was hardly one to begin with. In fact, Meyer Luckman’s crime had made headlines in New York City on and off for two years. He had been linked in headlines to one of the most notorious criminals of the 1930s. How had a story as uniquely and perversely American as this one—one family’s journey from mob murder to Monsters of the Midway in a few short years—slipped through the cracks? A homicidal father whose son became a seminal figure in the one sport that mimics the nation’s history of territorial gang violence? You couldn’t invent it if you tried.
But it happened, even if it was suppressed, misplaced, forgotten—and finally silenced by time.
Excerpt from Tough Luck: Sid Luckman, Murder Inc., and the Rise of the Modern NFL, by R.D. Rosen, published by Atlantic Monthly Press. Copyright © 2019 by R.D. Rosen.
